As of January 10 2017, 57 states have endorsed the Safe Schools Declaration, setting out the importance of protecting schools during armed conflict. This post summarises a mini seriesprobing the international legal protection of education, and the Declaration, in the context of non/international armed conflict. Each of the four postings (published here and here) begins by recallingthe violated spaces of learning of the recent past. Again and again, such attacks have caused senior representatives of the United Nations to state: ‘even wars have rules’. Of course, there is credence to the view that those rules, in the words of Antonio Cassese, ‘hold Armageddon only partially at bay’. Certainly today — from San’a to Aleppo and beyond — they remain apparently ‘all too often checkmated by sheer power’. And, this necessarily places pressure on foundational humanitarian rules.

Images of violated spaces of learning — untouched since the moment of flight — have a visceral luminosity that belies the absence within. Latent there are the attacks or acts of violence of the recent past: the incursions of spatial and bodily inviolability, or as opined in postings one and two, violations of the international legal obligations to protect embodied learners, and their spaces of learning from attack. Lesser stated (if there is no rapid recovery response or alternative) is the multi-dimensional hurt and harm that lies beyond: the violations of the rights to, in and through education (see posting three of this series). And the hurt and harm beneath: domestic embodiment of those rights may be partial and/or access to public affairs or remedies limited. Or in other words, the vulnerability shift from ordinary to extraordinary embodied vulnerability may precede, undergird and be exacerbated by the attack. The sole form of redress, then, may be international law.

The recent violations of spaces (of lower and higher) learning have evoked near universal condemnation. Held there are ‘the dictates of public conscience’. Undergirding, if not sparking, this collective sense of injustice is a supposition: the spaces of learning are supposedly inviolable from attacks /acts of violence. From this, a supposition of law might follow: ipso facto the spaces are protected as inviolable as a matter of international law. But is this so?

Disparate places, among others, bound by attacks—acts of violence—on the supposed inviolable spaces of lower and higher learning, schools and universities, among others. The attacks and their impact—the hurt and harm—on children and adults’ embodied selves resonate far beyond their geographical axis. Or, to invoke the Martens Clause, they may be supposed as violating ‘[…] the laws of humanity and the dictates of public conscience.’ And, in doing so, they undergird the continuing juristic shift of the past century towards the international legal protection of our ‘embodied vulnerability’ to hurt and harm of all forms.* Like other serious violations of international law, then, the attacks transcend the—sometime—distance between us. But is the clarity of our collective sense of justice reflected in the law?